For suburban kids, pills are path to heroin addiction

Defense attorney Thomas Ramsay has lived in the affluent Chester Springs community for more than two decades. During that time, he has represented defendants from the area, young and old, for any number of crimes.

But in the middle of the past decade, Ramsay said in an interview, he began to notice a change in the status of the young people who appeared in his office.

“We started to see a lot of cases involving pills,” he explained. Pills like the prescription drugs Vicodin, Percocet and Oxycodone — opiod painkillers that were becoming more and more available as street drugs. The pills were seen as somehow less harmful or edgy than the other glamour drug at the time – cocaine – and because some of them could be found in a teenager’s parents’ medicine chest, more available.

Most disturbingly for Ramsay was that the use of prescription painkillers was leading the youths who used them to the most dangerous street drug of all, heroin. And so those teenagers – some of them students at well-respected schools like Downingtown East High School in the Chester Springs and Lionville community – were showing up addicted to heroin, and committing crimes to pay for the drug.

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“Once they became addicted to Oxy, and had to pay $50 a pill, they couldn’t afford it anymore,” Ramsay said. “Heroin was just a quick lap away.

“So you had you girls and guys with no prior record of criminal behavior who were now using heroin,” Ramsay said. Sometimes, they would steal from their parents to get money to buy the drug, which, while cheap, necessitates daily doses for an addict to maintain. When they no longer could steal from their parents, they stole from neighbors and others, he said. They were hopping on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the Downingtown Interchange in Uwchlan and driving to North Philadelphia – the so-called “Badlands” – and buying heroin from street corner drug dealers.

“It was so available,” Ramsay said. “And they were putting their lives at risk to get the drugs that were putting their lives at risk.”

Ramsay’s perception of the heroin problem among suburban, middle class teenagers is not simply anecdotal. According to national data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the number of teens dying from heroin abuse has skyrocketed. In 1999, 198 people between the ages of 15 and 24 died of a heroin overdose, compared to 510 deaths in 2009.

According to a report on NBC News, prescription painkillers are the link between suburban teens and heroin. Youths addicted to pills like Oxycodone look for heroin, which is cheaper and easier to buy.

And the New York State Department of Health cites statistics that every day, 2,500 children ages 12 to 17 abuse a pain reliever for the first time. In 2008, more than 2.1 million teens ages 12 to 17 reported abusing prescription drugs. Among 12 and 13 year olds, prescription drugs are the drugs of choice.

Prescription and over-the-counter, or OTC medications are fast becoming the new “party” drugs for many teenagers, the department stated in a news release. “The new trend among youth is known as ‘pharming,’ that is, kids using prescription and OTC drugs for recreational use,” the department warned.

The scenario echoes that which befell Garrett Reid, the son of former Eagles coach Andy Reid, who died of a heroin overdose at Lehigh University last summer during the team’s training camp. In a court appearance after his arrest for drug possession, Reid told probation officers that he didn’t use drugs until after graduating from high school.

He said his drug use began with marijuana and alcohol and moved to prescription painkillers, cocaine and then heroin.

Two other cases illustrate the path Ramsay has observed. In 2011, West Chester police arrested a West Goshen woman who was helping her 14-year-old son sell prescription drugs to his friends near West Chester’s B. Reed Henderson High School.

In 2010, a West Pikeland high school student at Downingtown East, the daughter of a prominent physician in the community, was found with more than a dozen packets of heroin in a backpack while in school. She said she was addicted to the drug and spent more than 20 days in prison for the crime of possession.

“It used to be that you thought of heroin addicts as living in Coatesville or Philadelphia,” Ramsay said. “It’s now completely upper middle class white kids using heroin. It’s just crazy.”